Posts in Category: San Diego
Golden Slippers
We all know the Snowy Egret (we are having a break today from Snowy Owls 🙂 has yellow feet…so much so that, in birding circles, we often call the bird “golden slippers”…but that does not mean we see the slippers often. In fact we rarely get to see them…and when we do it is generally no more than a diagnostic glimpse. Often they are buried in and/or coated with mud. Generally they are below water. Disguised or hidden. Hard to see. So this shot of a Snowy, a wild bird on the grounds of the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, is special…both for the clear sight of the Golden slippers and for the active posture of the bird as it strides across the little ornamental brook.
Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 75-300mm zoom. 328mm equivalent. ISO 400 @ 1/800th @ f5.8. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
Bougainvillea
It is going to be a while before we have wildflowers in Maine (or garden flowers for that matter…though we may see crocus soon), so I am dropping back a month or more to the sunny days I spent in San Diego for this Bougainvillea against the classic brick wall of the Conference Center at Mission Bay Marina Village. As you see, the flowers are already gone, but the bracts are still bright against the wall. Of course the picture is about the texture of the brick and the warmth of the San Diego, semi-tropical light.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 175mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, sharpness, and clarity.
Snail in Paradise
I may have (actually I know I have) mentioned before how much I enjoy the Bird of Paradise plants and flowers that are always in bloom when I visit San Diego in early March. I always come back with lots of pictures of the colorful, striking blooms. And occasionally I catch something out of the ordinary. Like this snail, firmly attached to the underside of one of the petals (braches?).
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 45mm macro. f3.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Western Tiger Swallowtail
I shared a backside view of this Western Tiger Swallowtail from the Bird and Butterfly Garden in the Tijuana River Open Reserve a while ago, but today we can enjoy the full frontal view. And isn’t that weird, because, technically speaking, this is the “back’ of the butterfly. It is what is more commonly seen in the field, what is almost always photographed, and what is displayed in collections…so I suppose it is natural that we think of it as the frontal view.
Western Tiger Swallowtails are super common in southern California so no one else at the San Diego Birding Festival got very excited about my pictures, but for an eastern boy it was quite a treat, and fully justified my efforts in locating the Bird and Butterfly Garden, and the good people of San Diego’s efforts in building it. Of course, it was the only butterfly I found there.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view from about 5 feet. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Kestrel on the Hover: Happy Sunday!
While hiking at the Tijuana River Estuarine Reserve south of San Diego, I had a close encounter with an American Kestrel. She sat on the barbwire top strands of the Imperial Air Base fence hunting grasshoppers in the tall brush of the Reserve. She was so intent on her hunt that she paid little attention to me. There was no way to avoid walking past her, as that is were the path went. Twice she got up and moved down a few sections of fence, before finally circling back around to land on the fence behind me, very close to where I had first seen her. And she was still there, an hour later, when I came back by on my way to the car.
Of course I took a lot of pictures, both going and coming back.
In my world, the Kestrel shares favorite bird status with the Green Kingfisher, so this was a very special treat! On the way back, as I pushed by her, she got up and hovered over the brush. I had just the presence of mind to shove the control dial on the camera over to Sports Mode, and get off a burst of images while she hung in the air above me at 35 or 40 feet. The lead shot here is the best of the hover shots.
It was not until I got to processing the image that I realized what I had captured. Anyone who has ever watched Kestrels for any length of time knows they hover, but I, for one, had never thought about how they manage to do it. There are only a few birds that actually hover…that is, remain in one spot in the air, while beating their wings to maintain both altitude and position. Hover, as opposed to “kite”, which is, as the name implies, to hang in the air, weight balanced by force of the wind, with extended wings more or less stationary. It is a quiz I like to give when teaching birding. Name the birds that can hover. And then, name the birds that kite.
The hummingbird is the most obvious of the hoverers, and one almost everyone knows. I know, from my little study of hummingbirds, that they manage to hover so effectively because they, unlike most birds whose wings are relatively fixed at the horizontal, can rotate their wings on the axis of the wing to almost any position. Until I saw this image of the Kestrel, I had not thought through the implications. Rotating the wing toward the vertical is a requirement for any bird to truly hover. The bird has to spill air on the upstroke. And, from the image, the Kestrel actually does rotate at least the outer half of its wing to remain stationary. Amazing.
Now there might be many people who already know this about the Kestrel, but I was not one of them, and I have not found another in showing this image to quite a few birders. The Kestrel, like the hummingbird, can rotate at least part of its wing to the vertical. You learn something new every day!
And that brings us to the Sunday Thought. “You learn something new every day.” That is what attracts me to birding, and photography, and watching dragonflies and butterflies, and to reading, and to watching good movies, and to social media, and to the life of faith. You learn something new every day! I love to learn, even more than I love to know. The love of learning new things is a different motivation than the accumulation of knowledge. Knowledge is the by-product. The satisfaction comes in the learning itself. And I truly believe that the love of learning is inherent to the human, to all of us in our native state. Like the children in Jesus’ parable, those who love learning, will inherit the kingdom of heaven. Those who love to learn…those who great every day, every moment, as an opportunity to learn…those who live to learn…are already well on the way to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Pocket Gopher Encounter
We do not have gophers in the North-east, where I grew up, and continue to spend most of my time. I have never lived with a gopher infested lawn or garden patch, so I know gophers only by reputation. We did have woodchucks, lots of woodchucks, which look to me to be giant gophers, where I grew up in up-state New York, but they are more of a problem in pastures than in lawns and gardens. According to the range maps, I might have seen gophers in New Mexico in the 12 years I lived there, but I can not honestly say I remember seeing any. New Mexico favors Prairie Dogs.
So I could really enjoy my first close encounters with Pocket Gophers on this last trip to San Diego. I saw them first at Famosa Slough right in town, but this specimen is from Mission Trails Park, near Old Mission Dam. He was busy pushing dirt around and let me approach close enough for portraits.
They have, I find in a little research this morning, a reputation for being mean-tempered and likely to bite most anything or anyone that puts them in a corner, but here in their natural habitat with nothing to threaten them, I think they look sort of cute.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200mm optical zoom plus 1.5x Digital Tel-converter). f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Symmetry and the Egret
Even on my busiest days in San Diego, I managed to get out birding for at least a few moments. This was taken in Southern Wildlife Preserve on the San Diego River Flood Control Channel, only a mile or so from the Marina Village Conference Center where the San Diego Birding Festival is held. It is a longish walk from the Conference Center, so I don’t get to the landward end of the Preserve that often, but this day I drove out Sea World Drive to the entrance to Old Sea World Drive. Old Sea World Drive is closed to through traffic and is home to joggers, walkers, bicyclist, and the occasional drive in birder.
I like the total symmetry here: bird and reflection, rock and rock. I like the way the light is enfolding the bird from the back. And I like the pose of the bird, with one foot tucked u[, but still showing. It is not the best portrait of a Snowy Egret, and the brightest highlights are blown out…but I still like the overall effect.
Canon SX50HS in Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 655mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 320. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And just for fun, here it is as a B&W.
Old Mission Dam, San Diego CA. Happy Sunday!
A week ago today I was still in San Diego. It was the last day of the San Diego Birding Festival and my 6th way from home. Every day in San Diego had been strenuous. Birding, photography, and hiking in the morning (or work on the company website and then out), then the afternoon and early evening being social and showing ZEISS optics to birders at the Marina Village Conference Center, then a late supper and some image processing before bed. By Sunday, I was tired. So tired I was tempted to sleep in and take an easy morning before the last day of the Festival.
But then I made the mistake of asking where to find dragonflies, and was told about Mission Trails Park and Old Mission Dam. A look at Google Maps and the park website showed that Mission Trails was only 15 minutes inland from my hotel, and very likely worth the visit. So I was up again on Sunday morning and out to be at the park when it opened at 8 AM.
In Mission Trails Park the San Diego River (there barely more than a good sized creek) has carved its way through some rugged little hills…just short of mountains…to form what is known as the Mission Gorge. It is not a gorge by real gorge standards, but it is a narrow, twisty little valley with rocky heights above and a good band of riparian habitat along the river at the base. In the early 1800s missionaries built a dam and a flume in Mission Gorge to supply water to the main mission, 3 miles down stream. The flume is long gone, but the dam still stands. (For an excellent history of the region and the park, visit the park website.)
This is an In-camera HDR Mode shot…3 exposures stacked and merged in camera to create a single extended range jpg file. I find that the HDR mode on The Canon SX50HS produces files that can be processed in Lightroom to excellent natural looking images with more shadow and highlight detail than would otherwise be possible. It is a subtitle effect compared to some of the In-camera and post-proeceesed HDR you see around the internet…but I like it!
24mm equivalent field of view. Recorded exif: f4 @ 1/200th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought: You know, I might just as easily have slept in last Sunday, tired as I was, and missed Mission Trails Park and Old Mission Dam. And that would have been a shame. And of course, I have every reason, based on many such mornings, and many such decisions…on a lifetime of such mornings and such decisions…to be confident that if I make the effort to get out, then God will meet me there with blessing! It happened day after day in San Diego, and it happens day after day where ever I am. Green pastures and still waters, or something equally as refreshing to my soul. All I have to do is get myself moving in the morning!
That Hummingbird Shot!
I got an unexpected gift on Thursday. I decided to go down to the other end of San Diego, to the Tijuana River Estuary, right along the US border, to see what I could see. The San Diego Birding Festival does field trips there every year, and the names of the places there: Dairy Mart Pond, Border Field Park, The Bird and Butterfly Garden, Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge and the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve come up in in any good description of the top birding places in San Diego County. And yet, in my 10 years of visiting San Diego for the Birding Festival, I had never been in the Tijuana Valley. Past time to do something about that. And besides, it seemed like the fresh water Dairy Mart Pond might be my best bet for early dragonflies. 
No dragonfiles, but I did find a lot of songbirds and raptors in the valley, some of which you will see here in due time. And then there were hummingbirds. Lots of hummingbirds almost everywhere I went in the valley. Mostly Anna’s in various stages of maturity. So the Tijuana River Valley itself was a gift, and I will certainly spend a morning there on future trips to San Diego…but of course it is this hummingbird shot that is the real gift! I believe it is a female Anna’s, by the chunky build and the location, but also by the sound it made in flight. Anna’s have a sharp, cracking energy to their flight that actually produces a unique sound that you can hear at close range. I was at the back end of the Bird and Butterfly Garden near the “Trail Staging Area” on the Tijuana River Open Space Preserve. This bird was in the red flowering bush for only 90 seconds total, visiting maybe a dozen flowers. I made several attempts to catch her at the flower. Most were empty frames…but this one! This one is the gift. This one made me smile out loud when I pulled it up on the LCD after the bird had flown off. When I got it up on the computer monitor that afternoon it gave me a little shiver.
It is not perfect. I would really like one like this with the gorget flashing in the sun, and the bird could be a touch higher in the fame. And, of course, there are lots of hummingbird shots like this one…and better than this one…with the bird at a flower. It is just that I have never taken one! Considering the difficulty of the shot, it still a wonderful gift!
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200 optical plus 1.5x digital tel-converter). f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/4/2012: Ghost Seal, etc., La Jolla CA
Seals look so sleek when they are wet that it is easy to forget that what we are seeing is fine fur covering their bodies. This seal has been out of the water long enough for the fur to dry. This is, perhaps, a particularly light colored seal, and quite striking among its fellows.
Taken at The Children’s Pool in La Jolla California. When I visit in early March, the Children’s Pool beach is always closed to humans while hundreds of seals use the sheltered cove and the beach to pup.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3 EV exposure compensation. 1) 1150mm equivalent field of view, f5.8 @ 1/400th @ ISO 100. 2) 60mm equivalent, f4 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. 3) 1150mm equivalent, f5.8 @ 1/320th @ ISO 100. 4) 840mm equivalent, f5.8 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.